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St. Vrain residents struggle to rebuild, fear for next flood

By Scott Rochat

Times-Call staff writer

Posted:
05/07/2014 10:08:51 PM MDT

Updated:
05/08/2014 05:28:48 AM MDT

It's been eight months since the flood and Victor Sacayon is still looking for help.

"I applied four times for FEMA and he never came," said Sacayon, whose home in the St. Vrain Village trailer park took severe damage in September's St. Vrain-Left Hand Flood: the roof, the sides, the drywall and more. "It's about five thousand bucks, easy. I'm broke, I don't have that kind of money."

And with spring runoff starting, he and his neighbors have another worry — do they have to go through this again?

"We're still in the same position we were nine months ago," said Victoria Encinia of her efforts to rebuild her own home. "We're still trying to get everything taken care of."

On Wednesday night, Longmont city staff did their best to quiet the fear of a flood sequel. In a presentation at Twin Peaks Charter Academy, they ran through the steps the city and county had taken since September. Breaches had been repaired, evacuation systems refined, defenses established. City workers began keeping a regular watch on the St. Vrain River and Left Hand Creek on May 1, and a study had shown that the St. Vrain' s channel could safely pass a flow of 2,500 cubic feet per second through the city — larger than any spring runoff of the last 30 years.

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Over the next five to 10 years, the city plans to make that channel larger, able to carry a "100-year flood" through Longmont: about 10,000 cfs. September's flood was roughly twice that, often described as a "500-year flood," meaning that it had a 1-in-500 chance of happening in any given year — roughly the chance of drawing four-of-a-kind in a five-card poker game.

That doesn't mean water can't come before then, which was why Carmen Ramirez of the city's community and neighborhood resources department urged the St. Vrain residents to sign up for Everbridge. The system allows the city to contact all the numbers associated with a particular neighborhood to warn of an emergency or evacuation.

"Please don't hold back of language," Ramirez told the largely Spanish-speaking crowd at the school. "We have plenty of bilingual people who can help."

But the help needed was often in tougher areas. For one of Encinia's neighbors (who declined to give her name), simply getting a contractor to come to her mobile home was too high a hurdle.

"The contractors are telling me 'We don't want to deal with mobile homes, we're too busy with houses,'" she said. "They're all interested in coming but once you tell them what kind of home it is, they change their tune quick."

Jon Clarke of the community and neighborhood resources office said afterward that may be because mobile homes have some extra complications. Because they're designed to be moved easily, he said, even a seemingly small repair can sometimes require an engineer's approval.

"In your home, it can be pretty easy to fix things," he said. "But here, you can't just pull up the carpet and pull up the subfloor — it's part of the structure."

In the case of the neighbor's home, that structure is already in pretty bad shape. Among other things, she said, she has cracks in the wall, a dropped foundation and plumbing that was knocked askew by the flood and now plugs up readily.

"We can only use so much water before it comes back into the house from one end to the other," she said.

Ramirez told the audience that while the city couldn't discuss individual cases during the presentation for privacy reasons, they would be glad to work with them one-on-one afterward. Other agencies present included the Red Cross, Colorado Spirit and the Long-Term Flood Recovery Group.

"We want to review your case and get you the help you need," Ramirez said to Sacayon.

Sacayon hoped so. But he wasn't ready to declare the struggle over yet.

"We'll see what happens," he said.

Those wanting to sign up for the Everbridge Alert system can go online to http://ci.longmont.co.us/police/massnotification.htm or call 303-651-8566 for more information.

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